Thermal Touch can turn any surface into a tablet

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One of the biggest problems for range finding cameras like Kinect is physical touch; it’s often important to be able to tell whether someone’s finger is hovering a millimetre over the surface of a table, or actually touching it. The resolution necessary to do that accurately, quickly enough to follow professional typist for instance, is very hard to come by. But a new innovation from a German company called Metaio takes a simple insight and applies it to great effect: with a simple thermal camera, they use the heat signatures left by our fingertips to turn virtually any surface into a touch interface. It’s called Thermal Touch.

Notice that it’s a tablet-like touch interface, rather than a touch screen. While sometimes the technology might be applied to objects that already have a visual structure on them (say, a chess board), most others will be flat and featureless (the surface of a table on which you want to play chess). In those cases, the technology utilizes existing augmented reality tech to live-edit some interface element into a video feed, and uses Thermal Touch tracking to coordinate your input with the functional elements. Keeping with the example of chess, your augmented reality glasses might layer the board over your view of the table, and then track which squares you touch for control.

The applications are nearly endless. Security passwords could be input on a custom keypad, unique to every user or even to every trip through security. With a sophisticated enough augmented reality system hooked to a Google Googles-like service, this technology could allow you to “click” on every image in a catalogue, or every ad in a magazine. A restaurant could hand out interactive menus with touch-to-order functionality… and they could be made of paper. You’d have to have an AR setup for that to work, however, and the restaurant would have to provide a (preferably passive and unprotected) wireless connection with it.

Consumer electronics could get quite a bit out of this as well, for instance projecting the controls for your MP3 player onto the arm of whichever shirt or jacket you happen to be wearing. Skin itself will likely be difficult, since by its nature skin won’t show a lasting heat signature of skin. Thermal cameras don’t have to be any more expensive than regular ones, and most of us already have two of those in a single handset.

This is the current test setup, bulky but effective.

Right now the technology is working with a webcam mounted to a tablet PC, but the team is working based on the assumption that some sort of video-computing hybrid will be strapped to a large number of people’s faces soon enough. Whether that might come in the form form of some future Google Glass is up in the air, but this technology does require actual augmented-reality capabilities — that is, you need a screen between your eye and the interface, a feature that doesn’t mesh with the off-in-a-corner display on Glass.

The team basically stumbled onto this innovation because some thermal cameras happened to be lying around the lab. That’s how easily this technology can be adapted to work; just by fiddling with the technology, you can immediately see the heat signatures we leave on virtually every object. A combination of remote thermal sensing like this, capitative touch sensing like we have in our touch screens, and broad motion-tracking like Kinect could allow trulyincredible levels of control.

If nothing else, innovations like this one will be necessary if we’re to see the expansion of advertising continue. We can’t make everything into a touchscreen, but the onset of wearable computing and user-friendly augmented reality hardware mean that, very likely, we won’t have to.